Don't read this / manifesto

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains, and is immortal. - Albert Pine


Humanity is under attack. The establishment brings terror, suffering, and devastation where ever they choose to strike, and there seems to be next-to-nothing left to stand in their way. They have the power of the H-bomb, they conquer through invasion and infiltration, they pervert the human minds and souls through an all-out informational war waged against decency, against kindness, against awareness. They indoctrinate people with the image of a world that starts with one's self and ends little beyond one's family, a world in which nothing else should ultimately mater. They rally people to vote for them, and they would stop at nothing to prevent anyone from challenging their system. They would preach that every vote matters, but they will not say just how much it matters for each of the parties involved. They will not say how the system is designed such that they will always somehow get "elected" to fill one slot in the matrix or another. And they will not say how much it matters to the ones who vote. They will not say just how minute the chances are for someone's vote to actually swing a balance. And they will not say that what one gambles with when one votes is one's own hopes and ideals. They will not say that. They will say the system is fine, that one has choices, but they will not expose just how minute the chances are for people to actually build their own choices. They will never publicly debate anything else than what they think they can control. Instead, they will make enough noise to cover any and all voices that they deem a threat to their establishment. And the better they get at preventing people from seeing the correlation between one's actions and the actual causes that determine those actions, the more power of manipulation they have. Propaganda is their ultimate brainwashing weapon, and the whole planet is on the brink of being chained in ignorance and hopelessly enslaved.

And soon there will be no place left to hide.

This is not fiction. This is happening today. World war III - the informational war - has long begun, and the aggressors' weapon of choice is a global-scale net of ignorance that is thrown upon the entire planet. Extreme selfishness then only comes as natural in a blindfolded world, and what better way to control all them legions of people than having any one of them ready to fight any other, at the push of a button. Their button. And all in the name of one's own individual interest. Most of this war's victims don't even know they have fallen, and most of the aggression armies' soldiers don't even remember, or realize, they are yesterday's victims. Indeed, for these ignorant actors this war does not even exist, for all they know. In the end this war cannot be truly won by anyone, as the winners are no more than the last victims in a world where ignorance reigns supreme and the machine completely takes over.

But there are some on the battlefield that are still standing, some who cherish their freedom to paint the world around them in any color they choose, even if only at random. They obstinately resist to contemplating their freedoms being taken away from them. At the very foundations of their souls, they doubt both their will, and their capacity, to not interact with others in ever new, playful ways. They doubt they should, or could, keep looking the other way. For them the war is real, and they can still tell evil when they see it. They are still trying to put up a fight, most of the time not driven by any consistent "theory of a better world", but simply against the invasion of ignorance, and the extreme selfishness and lack of compassion that ignorance inevitably brings with it. Their resistance is not necessarily meant to set free the fallen ones, people who maybe no longer want to be set free (although many of those are only "wounded", but not yet "dead"), but rather to fight against an invading system in which they themselves would be doomed to becoming first the victims, and then the soldiers, of utter ignorance.


The AI Project is here to resist. It is partly visible, but for most part it's hidden. Its visible side is both a call to join, and a suggestion as to what its hidden side might look like. It will try to navigate the ruff waters of public exposure at best it can, trying to constantly define both its purposes and its means.

When Strong AI will eventually come into being, emerging from this AI Project or from anywhere else, there will be no human mind able to either understand it (if thus instructed), or to fight against it. There will be no human mind capable of devising a strategy to fight a plan laid out by a strong AI agent. It will all be about who has it and who doesn't, and who'll have it first does matter.

The quest for building Strong AI is a fight for the future shape of humanity. No more, no less. Whoever gets there first will have the power to change the world in potentially irreversible ways. They will have the power to make children betray their parents, neighbors spy on each other, best friends to engage in devastating wars, communities to self-destruct. Or they will have the power to help the ones in need. And play. Let us not forget our history, human minds can be conquered, and souls perverted, in an informational war: hitlerjugend was born this way, suicide bombers operate this way, wars work this way, the world allowed itself to be brought at the brink of self-destruction during the cuban missile crisis, the fratricide sectarian wars prove it's possible, and the world-wide biometric police is just around the corner with very few seeming to care. Should such colossal powers fall in the hands of evil, they will be used in evil ways.

Will weapons-as-we-know-them disappear, will they be rendered useless in an informational war? Will suffering and fear become unnecessary for winning such a war? Maybe, but by no means will they be gone. The supreme pleasure of evil is to be at the controls of others' suffering, and nothing short of total control will ever suffice. Weapons will get ever more powerful, as measured on just about any imaginable metric: you'll have remote-torturing weapons, mass destruction weapons, "surgical operation" weapons, you name it. But merely possessing such weapons will not bring anyone protection: in an informational war, it may well be the enemy that operates your own weapons, without you ever knowing it. It's a spy game taken to the extreme.

But there is hope.

All over the the course of history, the ability to win a war systematically required an ever increasing amount of economic power. It was the economic might that fed the armies, may they be armies of soldiers on the battlefields, armies of scientists developing the new generation of weapons, or the armies of ordinary people that just needed to be kept away from interfering with the war plans. It was the holders of economic might that were the only ones that could plan war and execute it. The more the society evolved, the harder it was for small resistance groups, increasingly disadvantaged in terms of economic power, to stand in the face of an invading army, let alone to challenge the principle of invasion itself.

But we live in an age of change, an age or a radical transformations. Knowledge, wisdom, and determination alone can now, for a brief period of time, completely overturn the balance of world power. Never before in the the modern age had small under-financed groups the means to directly send their message to entire continents. They do now. Not only do they have such means, but, with today's technology, individually customized messages can be sent to every single person in the world-wide audience. A communication vehicle that powerful has never been in the hands of anybody before the advent of the internet and the various other the modern communication tools, and now it's at the fingertips of half the planet. All that remains to be developed is the ultimate tool of persuasion, a tool that will fully utilize the technological might that is so accessible in the modern world. And it will be developed, probably sooner rather than later, but, again, the big menacing question is: who will be the ones who'll own it.

Persuasion is a matter of intelligence,
and we live in an era when super-intelligence can be built. Moreover, building such super-intelligence increasingly seems to be a matter of intelligence bootstrapping and very little else, which makes it equally approachable by both the establishment and the resistance. If indeed intelligence plus a customized communication channel to every person on the planet is all that's needed to turn the world around, then the resistance's problem these days no longer is the lack of economic resources, as very little of those would be required to pursue just about any imaginable goal; rather, it is its lack of organization and its inability to articulate a compelling alternative to be spread all over the planet. Moreover, one or both of the above are sometimes strangely viewed as virtues, or even necessities, rather than obstacles, and what one gets is the current state of affairs where the resistance is an almost invisible heterogeneous "movement" with little if any power to define itself, let alone to shake the system it deems so utterly wrong. The establishment is now vulnerable, probably for the first time in history, at its very material foundation - the human minds that devise and perpetuate its doctrine, but what exactly should be put in place, let alone how, is, to this day, anyone's guess.

The human mind is the last frontier, and history proves it can be conquered in an informational war. And strong AI technology is more than capable of winning that war. The real question now is: who will be sitting at the buttons.

Hopefully, the future is unwritten.

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